How to kill people – in a Christian sort of way

Date Published: {J}

It’s the kind of thing you couldn’t make up – or at least, wouldn’t want to. The US and UK armies in Afghanistan and Iraq are shooting Muslims with guns that have Bible quotations on them. Talk about adding insult to injury – and indeed to death and maiming.

The markings are on those high-tech luminous gun sights, and include "2COR4:6" and "JN8:12", references to versus from the second epistle of Paul to the Corinthians and the Gospel of John respectively. Just coincidence? After all, just about all modern manufactures are covered in opaque serial numbers and codes. They can’t all be Bible quotes.

But no, these guys really mean it. They’re called Trijicon, and they make their precision optics strictly in accordance with ‘Biblical standards’. So when, in the dead of night, a sniper draws a bead on his unsuspecting enemy’s head he’ll be looking through an eyepiece inscribed with a reference. And if he knows his Good Book, he will remember that John 8:12 reads: “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Then he will gently squeeze the trigger, and make a stranger’s skull explode into thousands of bloodied shards.

It’s clear that not everyone understands Christian principals in quite the same way. Some see them as being about turning the other cheek, others as being about firing bullets repeatedly through those cheeks, and other parts of the face. Company founder Glyn Bindon is dead now. It’s enough to make me wish there were a Heaven and all that, because I would love to have seen the look on his own face as Jesus roundly slapped it before throwing him into whatever really special pit of hell they devised for people who can interpret the ‘Light of the World’ as ‘night vision long range rifle sight’.

And needless to say, this will be a fabulous propaganda coup for Al Qaeda. The Americans and British can deny being Crusaders all they like, but when they start shooting you with guns decorated with Christian texts the prosecution can pretty much adjourn.

It makes a pleasant change then to see US forces engaged in an operation where for once you don’t feel more like rooting for the other side. Though food and medical aid is taking time to reach victims, only the most churlish could actually blame that on the enormous efforts America has made to help. It must be an incredible nightmare trying to reach a million and a half displaced victims in a city where the entire infrastructure has been wiped out. Few organisations could even hope to try.

I missed this America, the one that can be generous, courageous and swift to aid. The one that uses its Christian ideals for guidance rather than as propaganda. The one that . . . has a Democrat in the White House basically. It’s instructive to consider that, even in the depths of the worst depression in half a century, the US under Obama did more to help the disaster victims of neighbouring Haiti than Bush did in New Orleans for his own people.